We ought to understand how religion works. It's not a democratic system based on evidence and free-thinking individuals, but it's a hierarchy based on power and deception. The weakest at the bottom are children.

Of course children are not yet ready to be free-thinking individuals, and so they're the most vulnerable group both in society and in any culture. They're also the ones who grow up and shape religion in the future. They are the primary target for religious programming.

Religious parents believe that religion makes them moral and good, and therefore, they believe that forcing it on their children makes their children moral or good. That means, then, in the minds of fundamentalists, that children are immoral and evil until they 'learn' to be moral and good. This is clearly dangerous thinking primed for corruption and abuse.

RDFRS US:
The mission of the Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science is to support scientific education, critical thinking and evidence-based understanding of the natural world in the quest to overcome religious fundamentalism, superstition, intolerance and suffering.